Corporations Bailing Out Randy With Money They Stole From You

Just received this in email from Eric Massa's campaign:

Randy's latest "48 hour" FEC financial report reads like a who's-who of the financial services industry (the recent recipients of $850 BILLION of your tax dollars), as well as oil and gas companies.

Here's just a small sample, lifted directly from Randy's report:

$5,000 - EXXON MOBIL CORPORATION
Date Contributed = 10/30/2008

$3,000 - SALLIE MAE INC POLITICAL ACTION COMMITTEE
Date Contributed = 10/30/2008

$2,000 - CONOCOPHILLIPS SPIRIT PAC
Date Contributed = 10/30/2008

$2,000 - JPMORGAN CHASE & CO. PAC
Date Contributed = 10/30/2008

$1,000 - KPMG PARTNERS/PRINCIPALS & EMPLOYEES
Date Contributed = 10/30/2008

$2,000 - WAL-MART STORES INC. PAC
Date Contributed = 10/30/2008

$1,000 - AMERICAN GAS ASSOCIATION
Date Contributed = 10/29/2008

The same Sallie Mae that receives PUBLIC funds and just got a huge cut of the bailout bill? Why, yes.

The same Exxon Mobil that is gouging working families at the pump with record prices while only days ago reporting the largest single quarter profit in American history? Yup.


Please give what you can today. We cannot allow Wall Street to decide who our next Congressman will be.

It's an outrage that these companies -- whose greed has so damaged our political and economic system -- would receive billions in tax breaks and grants from hard-working Americans, and then funnel that same money back to the career politicians that perpetuate the system.


It's outrageous, it's wrong, and it has to stop.

New Obama Ad: "Parachute"

Nice. Hit McCain in the Cara Carleton Sneed plexus -- the woman pinkslipped 20,000 workers, halved the value of the company, and H-P still paid her $42 million to walk away. Obcene.

And Carly Fiorina was one of McCain's chief economic advisers, until she made the fatal mistake of saying that Sarah Palin couldn't run a corporation.

New Obama Ad: A Stronger Economy

Good, not great, but solid. I like the serious tone, and the lack of cutesy music. I wish it was lit a little better.

Drunk Broke America

President AmericaFucker
yahoo

Ultimately, it is a good thing that it's all out on the table before the election, but really, media? The guy has been a MISERABLE FAILURE since Day 1. Nice of you to notice.

Socialism on Wall Street

You've Got the Fed (song parody)

Last night your government spent $85 billions dollars (that's $85,000,000,000) to buy an 80% share in insurer AIG.

We bought an insurance company that is saddled with piles of Big Shitpile debt! Whee-hoo!

Corporate welfare at it finest.

This is the ultimate conclusion of the Bush Era. Billions to prop up the shells of the corporations that the oligarchs have looted to buy their mansions and private planes. They got the money; we got the shitty debt.

The Republicans base is now larded with money to give the Republican Party for the rest of our lives.

Maybe that was the real Bush Doctrine. No wonder Caribou Barbie couldn't answer the question.

All Hail Obama

BagNewsNotes

Robert Koehler, Huffpo: The Done Deal

If politics is the art of saying nothing, then Barack Obama is sure blowing it, isn't he?

His latest "gaffe," to proclaim at a private fundraiser in San Francisco (of all places) that small-town Americans are bitter and cling to guns and God in lieu of financial security -- these words purveyed to the American public by way of a scratchy, Osama-quality recording -- triggered such heartfelt hypocrisy from his opponents.

"It is hard to imagine," said John McCain, "someone running for president who is more out of touch with average Americans."

I almost agree with this. Obama is definitely out of touch with something. However, it isn't "average Americans" -- who, it turns out, really are bitter in large numbers -- so much as what I would call "the tacit covenant of presidential politics."

Serious presidential candidates aren't supposed to go there, see. That's what makes them "serious" -- their understanding that American politics is settled, a done deal. The deal is this: While real Republicans can drift, unchecked, to the dark side of empire and neofascism, Democrats are supposed to campaign and govern as moderate, "responsible" Republicans.

We live, in other words, in a corporate state, the basic terms of which are no longer open to debate. The "class struggle" is over. What about this do you not understand, Candidate Obama?

All hail the (invisible) corporate state and its sacred fetishes: God, guns, flag. All hail the cliche that is America, with its hard-working little people who get the job done. All hail the McWorkers of the new economy, who roll up their sleeves and vote for one smiling liar or another on their way to their second job. All hail the dearth of health care, the children left behind, the endless billions for war and most of all the fact that these matters are not -- I repeat, NOT -- open for discussion in this presidential election year or, God willing, the next one or the next.

Stop, Thief: Bear Stearns Chairman Will Walk Away With $13.4 Million

Professional rich asshole: Nice work if you can get it.
Nothing like corporate welfare. After getting a $30 billion federal bailout (Billions for Billionaires! Nothing for Have Nothings, aka The Rest of Us!) and selling his company for pennies on the dollar (bankrupting employees and stockholders in the process) Bear Stearns Chairman James Cayne will walk away with millions. $13.4 million on top of the $232 million he earned from 1993 to 2006 (and whatever he earned in 2007 and this year).

NYTimes: Sale Price Reflects the Depth of Bear’s Problems

James E. Cayne, Bear Stearns’s former chief executive and one of its largest individual shareholders, will most likely walk away with a little more than $13.4 million, the value of his Bear stock holdings, according to James F. Redda & Associates. Those would have been worth $1.2 billion in January 2007, when Bear’s stock was trading at a $171.51. Mr. Cayne has taken home more than $232 million in salary, bonus and other pay between 1993 and 2006, the time period for which there is publicly available data, according to Equilar, an as an executive compensation research firm.

No wonder he didn't want to leave his bridge tournament as his company and his 14,000 employees went down the drain. He had nothing to worry about. The feds aren't going to go after his cushy life. It's just business! Rich guy's business. The ones against health care for the rest of us, or food for the poor, but when their bottom lines are at risk their hands are fully outstretched.

The best post I saw all day on Bear Stearns (by Athenae at First Draft) is applicable here. Why can't the government take that $13.4 million? Hasn't he already got enough? Didn't we just give him $30 billion for nothing? Can't we take some of his money, if not his stuff? Why not?

Does Bear Stearns have a big screen TV?

What about bling? Any bling they could sell?

Couldn't Bear Stearns just get a job, already? I mean, I know of six or seven places that are hiring. I don't know what they pay, but surely it would be enough to keep them in sneakers and Xbox games.

I mean, just last week I heard that when we bailed out the airlines, jewelry sales at Wal-Mart went up 1400 percent. I didn't see it myself, but my cousins told me they heard it from somebody who knows somebody who works there, and it was like Christmas morning when those government checks cleared. What can you expect, really, from people trained in government dependency, I guess, but it still pisses me off, because that's my money. Fucking leeches.

Let me ask those questions, those questions we ask of every beneficiary of the smallest drop of government assistance. Let me ask why this is the ONLY scenario in which our parsimonious bullshit about personal responsibility, about choices and consequences, about "survival of the fittest" and other forms of sicko math, need not fucking apply.

Let me ask just how the unholy fuck it is that we can quibble every single day for hours over lunches that would feed a small village for a week about the ten dollars a year we give to some social program and how it's going to waste because somebody fed us an anecdote about somebody somewhere faking their need. Let me ask just how the bloody fucking blue hell we can get all worked up over how the homeless people downtown don't deserve our pennies because one of them said something rude to us on the way out of a store, and how they're just gonna spend our 65 cents on booze and then pee on the stoop. Let me ask how on earth we can take all the time it takes to think up all the ways we think up to sit in judgement on every individual case we hear about, about how that person just didn't work harder, didn't suffer enough, didn't earn "our" money, didn't deserve "our" charity, didn't bleed in front of us enough, and all the while, all the fucking while, we give it away by the millions and never ask where it goes. All the while.

Let me just ask. I'm sure somebody out there has the answer. After all, they had reasons why Katrina victims deserved to drown and die, be forced from their homes and screwed by their insurance companies and disregarded by their country. They had reasons why uninsured children didn't deserve health care, why those who died from a lack of medical attention only got what they had coming. They had reasons why the people who came to emergency rooms were just looking for drugs, they had reasons why thieves got rich and saints got shot, they had all kinds of explanations for everything that looked to everybody else like a fucking problem we needed somebody to solve. I'm sure the answers here are just as simple, just as easy.

But I do think we should ask. And you know, I think we should ask in the same condescending, fuck-all-you-peasants know-it-all bullshit fuck-ass tone that we use when requesting that the rest of the nation's needy prove their legitimacy to us. I think we should ask with the same nasty assumptions at the back of our throats, the same willingness to believe that somebody else is running a scam on us to get a fat government check, the same nasty, mean, small little pinchingness we use toward individual human beings. I think we should ask those questions.

I mean, for all we know, maybe Bear Stearns has a big ol' diamond cross they could sell, to pay their own damn way.

Charity Begins in the Boardroom

Blue Cross-Blue Shield of Massachusetts
Blue Cross-Blue Shield of Massachusetts, the health insurer, is organized as a charity. Hah. Their outgoing chairman was awarded a $16.4 million severance payment on his way out the door. Nice work if you can get it, but it doesn't seem very charitable. It's the way a for-profit company works. They pretend to be a charity, but we all know better, don't we? They're a charity to get tax breaks, not a charity to spread money around to the people they supposedly serve.

Massachusetts AG Martha Coakley is investigating.

Boston Globe: AG looking into $16.4m severance
Blue Cross-Blue Shield payment to ex-CEO seen as extraordinary

[William C.] Van Faasen received $16.4 million in a lump-sum retirement benefit in January 2006 when he stepped down as chief executive. He continued as chairman until his retirement this month. The size of the payment is considered extraordinary by some because as a nonprofit, Blue Cross-Blue Shield is expected to use surpluses to support its healthcare mission.

Commenting on public charities in general, Harry Pierre, a spokesman for the attorney general, said, "A public charity must use all of its funds to advance the charitable purpose for which it was established." Emily J. LaGrassa, director of communications for Coakley, declined to comment on the investigation.

[]

With more than 3 million members, Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Massachusetts is about twice as big as the second- and third-largest health insurers combined. In 2006 it had annual revenue, mostly from premiums, of more than $2 billion, and generated net income of $157 million.

[]

Van Faasen earned nearly $3 million in salary and bonus in 2006, according to a recent filing made with Coakley's office, which oversees the state's charities and nonprofits. That included $500,000 in base pay and $2.46 million in bonus based on results, according to the company's filing.

But it was the $16.4 million that attracted the most attention within Massachusetts' close-knit healthcare industry. The retirement pay was earned throughout Van Faasen's 17-year career at Blue Cross-Blue Shield, the company said. Some of the payout was disclosed in filings with the attorney general's office made in previous years, Murphy said at the time. Other portions were not disclosed, because of arcane disclosure rules and how the retirement payments had vested.

The Real Mitt Romney

"He took good jobs with benefits, and created low-wage, part-time, no-benefit jobs. That's what he was creating with his investments."

- Randy Johnson, Ampad worker, fired after Mitt Romney's Bain Capital took over his paper plant.

Which is why people like Romney are rich and people like Randy Johnson are struggling. Why no non-wealthy person should even consider voting for Romney or any other corporate Republican.

LATimes: To assess Romney, look beyond the bottom line

Depleted Uranium the Scourge of Colonie, New York: And Iraq and Afghanistan

The Observer (uk): 'Safe' uranium that left a town contaminated
They were told depleted uranium was not hazardous. Now, 23 years after a US arms plant closed, workers and residents have cancer - and experts say their suffering shows the use of such weapons may be a war crime

[] In a paper to be published in the next issue of the scientific journal Science of the Total Environment, a team led by Professor Randall Parrish of Leicester University reports the results of a three-year study of Colonie, funded by Britain's Ministry of Defence.

Parrish's team has found that DU contamination, which remains radioactive for millions of years, is in effect impossible to eradicate, not only from the environment but also from the bodies of humans. Twenty-three years after production ceased they tested the urine of five former workers. All are still contaminated with DU. So were 20 per cent of people tested who had spent at least 10 years living near the factory when it was still working, including Ciarfello.

The small sample size precludes the drawing of statistical conclusions, the journal paper says. But to find DU at all after so long a period is 'significant, since no previous study has documented evidence of DU exposure more than 20 years prior... [this] indicates that the body burden of uranium must still be significant, whether retained in lungs, lymphatic system, kidneys or bone'. The team is now testing more individuals.

[]

[I]nside the body DU travels around the bloodstream, accumulating not only in the lungs but also in other soft tissues such as the brain and bone marrow. There, each mote becomes an alpha particle hotspot, bombarding its locality and damaging cell DNA. Research has shown that DU has the potential to cause a wide range of cancers, kidney and thyroid problems, birth defects and disorders of the immune system.

When DU 'penetrators' - armour-piercing shells that form the standard armament of some of Britain's and America's most commonly deployed military aircraft and vehicles - strike their targets, 10 per cent or more of the heavy DU metal burns at high temperatures, producing oxide particles very similar to those at Colonie.

TV footage shot in Baghdad in 2003 shows children playing in the remains of tanks coated with thick, black DU oxide, while there have long been claims that the DU shells that destroyed Saddam Hussein's tanks in the 1991 Gulf war were responsible for high rates of cancer in places such as Basra.

As a side note, the plant in Colonie was owned by National Lead (now reconstituted as NL Industries), the same execrable company that brought you lead poisoning and brain damage from lead paint. And the feds have insulated them from paying for the depleted uranium cleanup. The article doesn't say so, but I bet they were insulated from paying the claims of the injured, too. Corporate welfare at its finest.

In 1984, having bought the factory from NL for $10 in a deal that meant the firm was exempted from having to pay for its clean-up, the federal government began a massive decommissioning project, supervised by the Army Corps of Engineers.